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S U R G I C A L
N A V I G A T I O N
The Case for Surgical Navigation
Computer-assisted cuts can lead to improved outcomes.
Brian R. Hamlin, MD | Pittsburgh, Pa.
Your orthopods probably do very well with nothing more than their eyes and hands to guide them. But what if they could place screws and align implants with greater ease and accuracy? They can. Computer-assisted surgery improves the precision of knee and hip replacements, optimizing outcomes by taking some of the complexity out of highly complex procedures.
Real-time guidance
There are 2 main types of
computer-assisted surgery: image-guided and
imageless.
• Image-guided systems
work from CT scans or
MRIs taken of the
patient's joint before surgery. In the OR, the computer navigation system
matches the real-time
information surgeons capture to anatomical data on the pre-op imaging. Surgeons can also "paint" areas of the patient's anatomy with the tracking technology — contours of the entire distal femur and entire proximal tibia, for example — to zero in on where implants should be placed in order to best reproduce anatomy and optimize joint mechanics.
During image-guided surgery, surgeons work with perfect representations of patients' joints. Based on the
